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UQ: Flag desecration in the US
28 Apr 1999
I was looking for information on the United Nations on the web and I found
myself on a page which had information of flag desecration in the US. This
is a slightly long one, but it is interesting and has a HUGE scoop at the
end.
The US as of now, does not have laws which prohibit the desecration of
their national flag. Being an Indian, I was amused that there could be
any opposition against a law to prohobit flag desecration.
On 25 May 1995, a Subcommittee on the Constitution of the House of
Representatives agreed by a seven-to-five vote on a proposed
constitutional amendment empowering Congress and the states to
prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States
of America. The Senate did not consider it, because it was too busy with
other business.
In 1997, the House cleared the amendment by 312-120 in 1997, but the
Senate rejected it by 63-36, four short of the two-thirds majority needed.
The oppostion to the amendment stems from the First Amendment. The U.S.
Supreme Court had passed judgements in the past that said prohibiting flag
burning or other forms of physical desecration of the flag runs counter to
the First Amendment right to freedom of expression. In 1989, the U.S.
Supreme Court, in Texas vs. Johnson, invalidated flag protection laws in
48 states and the District of Columbia.
The effort has been renewed now to pass the amendment. On April 20th,
1999, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on Senate Joint
Resolution 14, a proposed constitutional amendment that would return
to the American people the right to protect their flag. The amendment
has 58 co-sponsors and reads:
"Congress shall have the power to prohibit the physical desecration of the
flag of the United States."
Also, to date, 49 state legislatures have passed memorializing resolutions
asking Congress to pass an amendment and send it back to the states for
ratification. The only state missing is Vermont.
On 24th April, the House Judiciary Constitution subcommittee on a 7-4
party-line vote, with all Republicans in favor and Democrats opposed. A
Senate panel is to consider the issue this week.
I find the arguments for the legislation very sensible.
"The flag of the United States represents values that bind America
together," said Rep. Charles Canady, Republican, chairman of the House
subcommittee. "It warrants our respect and protection."
The opposition to the amendment doesn't make much sense to me.
The flag is a symbol of inalienable rights such as freedom of speech, said
Rep. Mel Watt, Democrat, ranking Democrat on the panel. "I don't think we
can pass a flag amendment that undermines any of those inalienable
rights."
The proposed amendment would not ban the physical desecration of the flag
but would allow Congress to pass legislation to restrict conduct, but not
expression, concerning the flag.
If the proposed amendment were to pass both the House and Senate by
two-thirds majorities, then three-fourths of the state legislatures would
have to ratify it withing 7 years before the amendment would become part
of the Constitution.
The Citizens Flag Alliance, Inc., is a coalition of organizations, most of
which are national in scope, that have come together for one reason: to
persuade the Congress of the United States to propose a constitutional
amendment to protect the American flag from physical desecration, and send
it to the states for ratification. go to www.cfa-inc.org
!
Flag desecration laws in India
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The greatest democracy of the world - India on the other hand has strict
and severe laws to protect its national flag.
1. Parliament in 1950 included a section on the National Flag in The
Emblems and Names (Prevention of Improper Use) Act, forbidding its use in
any trade mark or design unless permitted by the Central Government.
2. In 1971 it passed the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act,
stipulating three years' imprisonment or fine, or both, for anyone who, in
public view, mutilates, defaces, defiles, disfigures, destroys, tramples
on or otherwise brings the National Flag into contempt.
Infact India has strict laws on the flag. Some of which are:
---
The dimensions of the National Flag should be in the ratio of 3 : 2 and
the Asoka Chakra should have 24 spokes.
The National Flag may be flown daily only from important public buildings
such as the Lok Sabha (The Parliament), the Rajya Sabha (The Assembly) and
the Supreme Court, at border posts, and on the official residences of the
President and Vice-President, governors and lieutenant governors.
The public may hoist the tricolour only on special days: Republic Day
(January 26), National Week (April 6 to 13), observed in memory of the
Jallianwala Bagh martyrs, Independence Day (August 15) and Mahatma
Gandhi's birth anniversary (October 2). The Flag may also be flown by
individuals on days declared for "national rejoicing" and in the states on
days of special significance (on May 1 in Maharashtra for instance, the
day the state was founded).
The privilege of flying the Flag on motor cars is generally reserved for
selected dignitaries: the President and Vice-President, governors and
lieutenant governors, the Prime Minister and other ministers, speakers,
chief justices and heads of Indian missions abroad.
The Flag should be hoisted at sunrise and lowered at sunset. It may be
displayed after sunset only on very special occasions. It should be raised
briskly and lowered slowly and ceremoniously.
No other flag or bunting should fly above the tricolour and none beside
it, except for the UN flag and other national flags which may be hung to
the left.
No flowers, garlands or emblems may be placed on the flagmast, nor any
other flag flown on the same pole.
The Flag should not be dipped in salute to any person, no matter how
exalted; or to any edifice or object, no matter how sacred.
The Flag should not be allowed to touch the ground or trail in water. It
should flutter freely.
The tricolour may not be used or displayed as a festoon, rosette, bunting,
curtain, tablecloth or drapery and pieces of coloured cloth should not be
arranged so as to look like it. It should not be used as part of a costume
or uniform, embroidered on cushions and handkerchiefs, or printed on
napkins and boxes. Lettering of any kind is not allowed on the Flag. Its
use in advertisements is prohibited except when allowed by the government.
When the Flag is worn out or faded, it should not be displayed. Once torn,
it should not be mended and used again. A damaged Flag must be burnt or
otherwise destroyed in a manner befitting its dignity.
On the death of a notable, whether Indian or foreign, the Flag is flown at
half-mast only on buildings where it is permitted to be flown daily; on
days when the Flag is being flown by all the people, it can be half-masted
only on the building where the body of the deceased is lying.
---
I have included below a letter written to the Senate chairman Henry Hyde,
in 1995 when the Flag amendment was taken up. It makes no sense to me. It
was written by PEN American Center, New York.
---
"The First Amendment to the Constitution says that `Congress shall
make no law... abridging the freedom of speech.' The U.S. Supreme
Court has determined that flag-burning can be a legitimate form of
speech. We therefore feel justified in stating that, if Congress
votes to pass H. J. Res. 79, Congress will be doing just what the
First Amendment says it can not do.
"We appreciate that there may be occasions when the burning or
defacing of the American flag amounts to damage to property,
trespassing, or even arson. However, laws exist that allow for the
prosecution and punishment of anyone who, in desecrating a flag,
concomitantly breaks these laws.
"Where, on the other hand, flag defacement amounts solely to a
peaceful expression of opinion, we believe it should continue to be
constitutionally protected. For example, individuals who buy or
make their own flags and then tear them up in a public space should
be considered to have done nothing other than peacefully exercised
their First Amendment right to free speech.
"H. J. Res. 79, however, would allow for the prosecution of these
individuals: as such it would tragically dilute what has hitherto
been prized by Americans everywhere as a cornerstone of our
democracy.
"The right to free speech enjoys more protection in our country
than perhaps any other country in the world. We urge you not to
tamper with this protection. We urge you to reject this proposal
out of hand."
---
Sources: Flagwire, April 14, 1999
US Newswire, 20 April, 1999
PEN American Center, New York
>From tomorrow, you can expect writing from Irina Ponomarev, living in
Belgrade about the war going in Yugoslavia.
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end of the game emulators? :-(
27 Apr 1999
--- UQ news
The much touted Apache helicopters experienced their first
crash even before they got into combat! One of the Apache helicopters
getting to Tirana airport in Albania crashed and burst into flames. It was
fully loaded with ammunition which began to explode after the crash. The
two man crew escaped alive.
Initial reports say the helicopter, which was returning from a routine
training mission, may have hit a tree and crashed several miles from
the airport, following a night-time training exercise.
To be fair to the Apache helicopters, they are THE most fearsome and
effective combat-proven helicopters today. The Apache can fly day or
night, using laser and infra-red targetting systems. The crew use
night-vision goggles. The helicopters can carry 16 laser-guided missiles,
up to 76 other rockets, and a rapid-fire cannon.
They were used to devastating effect in the Gulf War and are crediting
with destroying atleast 500 tanks.
---
In a surprising judgement, the sale of the Connectix PlayStation emulator
has been blocked by a US Federal District Court in San Francisco. A
sentence that could sound the death knell of the game emulators by setting
a legal precedent.
Sony Computer Entertainment won a court order Tuesday (April 22) that
prevents Connectix from selling its Virtual Game Station, software which
allows PlayStation games to be played on Apple's Macintosh computers.
Only a few days back on April 12th, another company called Bleem which
makes a similar emulator but running on Wintel machines got a favorable
verdict in its case against Sony. Actaully it wasn't a victory. The judge
refused to grant an interim order staying the sales of the emulator. The
emulator sells for $40 and using the software all of Sony Playstation
games which ship on standard CDs can be played on a win95 machine. Bleem
was until April 12th only providing demo versions of its product for
download. It is a very small company (only 3 people) and started shipping
products as soon as the preliminary verdict was given. The final case
still isn't over yet.
Connectix makes a very similar product, but running on the Macintosh. Sony
also failed to get a stay against Connectix when they started selling in
February. But with the latest verdict, Connectix may have no option but to
close shop and leave.
The whole point around which Sony's case revolves is the BIOS of its
Playstation. Sony claims, Connectix and Bleem infringed on its
intellectualy property rights by working on the BIOS.
Connectix however claims they legally reverse-engineered the BIOS and that
they did not violate any laws. The company said it would appeal the
decision and that it will continue development of the emulator for Mac and
its Windows version which was due later this year. On April 9th, before
the verdict was delivered, Connectix CEO Roy McDonald, said If the
judgment is against Connectix, the company will likely appeal or
countersue for damages.
--- Unquotidian Quotes: look beyond the horizon -----------
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friends but include this Copyright notice. To (un)subscribe
or add your friends email karu@vsnl.com -------------------
UQ: NATO war against Yugoslavia - western journalism ( specifically CNN) at its worst
26 Apr 1999
Yesterday (25th April), the American President Bill Clinton and the
British twit Tony Blair defined a new term called Front Line States of
Yugoslavia and extended NATO security to them. This has never before been
done in NATO's 50 history.
Jamie Shea, NATO spokesman in his daily briefing, concluded with a
bombshell, that went largely unnoticed. I didn't hear any gasps from the
openly pro-NATO western journalists in the briefing.
He said, if there is any aggression against these states, NATO will
respond without asking those countries if they indeed want NATO
intervention. Infact, he put in another way. He said, an attack on these
countries will be considered as an attack on NATO, and we will respond
(because NATO troops are stationed in some of these countries.) He also
made it clear that UN permission will not be asked for to launch these
attacks.
I wish to point out here, that Macedonia does NOT have a well defined
border. The 3 US soldiers were caught in one such area. So I have no idea
what these NATO dumbasses are going to do in these areas. I dont credit
them with enough intelligence to realise that, this is a problem.
Regarding, the use of the Apace helicopters, one of the journalist in the
briefing asked the military spokesman, when they would be used. He
replied, "Very soon." Thats it - and the journalist left him at that. I
dont see ANY use at all of journalists in these briefings, its like these
Oprah Winfrey shows, carefully orchestrated Question, answer sessions. And
most of these so called "news channels" carry these briefings live - daily
(for 33 days now).
The all American, NATO sucking CNN leads the pack in this. There was not
one report in CNN, which said, the USA was willing to take refugees into
USA - but not mainland US. It would be in its island bases all over the
world, which are primarily prison camps and military bases. Only after
severe protests from humanitarian agencies did the American strongman
relent. Not one word of this was heard on CNN.
Further, CNN still titles its coverage and all its graphics of the war, as
"Strike against Yugoslavia" although it is obviously open war. The word,
strike is the official NATO terminology. Most of its correspondents and
military specialists on the shows, refer to it as war, except the
anchorman/woman who under instruction always says, "strikes". BBC refers
to it as war in its news coverage.
There has still be no mention of nuclear weapons being used in attacks
against Yugoslavia. Jamie Shea was asked a fews days back in his briefing,
if DU shells were being used (See UQ 11, April). He refused to answer the
question and instead said, "NATO is not using any nuclear weapons". And
the asshole had audacity to laugh after saying this. Again CNN carried not
a single word on this.
The British twit Tony Blair has agreed to take 159 refugees (that is not a
typo, the number is ONE HUNDRED FIFTY NINE ONLY) into Britain. I am not
sure how many refugees he has agreed to take totally. But the 159 left for
Britain only yesterday, 33 days after the war started. Sweeden which is
much smaller than Britain has agreed to take 5000, and received their
first batch on 22nd April. The number of refugees is much more than
200,000. Again not a word of this on CNN.
But it is this twit and that sex crazed despot that shout the hoarsest
about human rights violation and all kinds of other banalities. To be fair
to the other American media, they are not as biased as CNN.
Also, Serbian TV was struck again today and came back on air shortly. They
showed footage of Yugoslav army generals meeting troops in the border
preparing for a possible ground attach. BBC said this in these words.
The NATO sucking CNN, said, "Serbian TV showed, **what it claimed was**
footage of generals meeting troops in the border." Each sentence was
prefixed with a "what it claimed".
But the same assholes, do not append a "what it claims" with any NATO
statistics. If NATO spokesmen says, today "the sun rose in the west" CNN
will make a "Breaking news" story and report that as is.
NATO said, it struck down Serbian TV, because it was being used for
propoganda. They then realised what a hollow claim this is and the latest
version from NATO is that they are determined to take down Serbian TV,
because it is being used for military purposes.
For once, one of the NATO countries showed some humanity and application
of mind. Italy protested the hitting of Serbian TV. But, I believe this is
more to do with Italy's own interest rather than any concern for
Yugoslavia. For a few days now Italy has been protesting that the Kosovo
war has hit Italy economically. Italian PM Massimo D'Alema said, the
Balkan conflict "has indirectly harmed Italians" and added that, it has
"caused a significant contraction in consumption and certainly does not
help the tendency to invest."
Italy slashed its growth forecast from 2.5 percent to 1.5%. Bank of Italy
governor also said, the GDP would be hit and the extent of damage will
depend on the duration of the war.
Yugoslavia proved its resourcefulness and pride by coming back on air
within hours of being struck down both times.
More arrogance and plain idiocy was shown by the American President and
his NATO underlings when they decided on the oil embargo. It is not a
trade embargo and the idea is to monitor the waterways, leading into
Yugoslavia and block all oil supplies. Russia has said, it will ignore the
embargo and go ahead with oil supplies.
This I believe is going to be the last straw. The western dumbasses
without ANY policy direction are pushing Russia into a corner. In a few
weeks a Russian oil tanker is going to be hit and ignite the Balkans in a
outright war with - Russia against NATO.
I have included below two letters written by a Serbian resident in
Belgrade. It captures the exact sentiments in Yugoslavia and why the
directions NATO "leaders" will never win this war. They are from BBC News
Online. CNN has absolutely NO contacts inside Yugoslavia. They have two
reporters inside - thats it. There are absolutely NO "inside" stories like
this. Instead, they have bullshit, like a story on, Clinton's face, which
they says looks like that of a President in war! I cant even laugh at
this. I can only pity them.
--- Letter 1
In the midst of the serious analysis of the Kosovo crisis, one thing
is often forgotten - the general single-mindedness among the Serbian
population brought on by the Nato bombing.
If one happens to be aware of the fact that one lives
under a repressive regime and disagrees with the local war-time
propaganda, one should keep one's mouth shut or risk getting court
martialled and prosecuted for grand treason (no such cases yet, but
everything is possible in war).
'The whole world hates us'
A famous Serbian songwriter Bora Djordjevic came up with the ultimate
patriotic song (the genre has been fully exploited on national TV
since the attack began) - tailor-made for the current situation and
recorded here two days ago.
The lyrics go: "Now that we're being bombed, we the Serbs don't argue
any more" and "The whole world hates us".
The Serbs are finally united. The little opposition that Milosevic had
to deal with is silent, the previously politically
undefined/indifferent citizens are now angry and ready to support him
at any price, even the ones who were aware of his past misdeeds think
he is not to be blamed for this.
Nato made them forget who the arch-culprit is and why we're in this
war in the first place.
'Miserable Clinton'
Morale-boosting concerts are being held daily on the Republic Square
in the centre of Belgrade, thousands of people are waving their flags
in a trance, drawing courage from the spirit of the masses.
Anti-Nato protest in BelgradeIndeed, these are hard days for an
individual in Serbia. No-one dares oppose or even laugh at the state
television labels "miserable Clinton", "genocidal Nato", "the infamous
Christopher Hill", "the frustrated James Rubin".
It is difficult to estimate whether there are people in this country
who actually disagree with such views - even if there was an
alternative opinion, and even if one dared to express it, we wouldn't
be able to hear it because the independent media that weren't banned
are operating under strict censorship (the daily newspapers such as
Danas, Blic, Glas Javnosti).
It has often been said that the West is aiming at Milosevic only and
that it sees the Yugoslav people as its greatest ally in the future.
The chances for winning over the Yugoslav public are - at least for
the time being - destroyed for sure.
We are now truly alone in the world. This fact makes some of us
desperate - while others relish it.
--- Letter 2
Friday, April 16, 1999 Published at 16:26 GMT 17:26 UK
Letter from Belgrade: Part II
A resident of Belgrade writes a second letter for BBC News Online
about life in the city at war with Nato:
As Nato attacks continue, Belgrade is still holding on -
or so it seems.
Although the general outpouring of patriotism is still strong and
Serbs are traditionally proud of their endurance, the fact that the
country is now half-devastated and that the economy will take decades
to recover would make any sensible person worried and subdued. Was it
all worth it?
This is a question no one dares ask, at least not in public. Forget
the factories, forget the airports and heating plants. Call me a
heretic and a traitor, but I was raised to believe that nothing is
more important than human life and now I get the feeling that not one
civilian casualty was worth sacrificing for all the dozens of Kosovo's
monasteries and churches.
Needless to add, this is not the general opinion of my compatriots:
the majority of Serbia's population would give their lives for Kosovo.
Therefore Nato sending in the ground troops would be one of the
biggest strategic mistakes in the history of our century.
If some Serbs were reluctant to go and chase the Albanians out, there
is not a single person I know who would not be more than glad to go
down there and charge into battle, hatchets and cutlery in hands
(since all other weapons will be destroyed by then) against the
disorientated Western soldiers.
It was them, not the Albanians who destroyed their country.
Nato's insistence on continuing with air-raids in order to "change
Milosevic's mind" now seems absolutely trivial and ridiculous: people
are left without their homes and Milosevic is still having a ball in
his royal residence in Belgrade's posh quarter, Dedinje, chatting with
numerous guests from abroad.
In bombing Yugoslavia's bridges, Nato has thoughtlessly burnt the
proverbial bridges for the Serbian people too.
Everybody knows that we never enjoyed living in a democratic society,
but the order that we are yet to encounter seems more frightening than
anything we've ever experienced.
The future is terror: the state's main enemies now are the independent
media and its journalists - as we have seen, the punishment for a
difference in opinion in Serbia is death. (The editor- in-chief of the
independent daily Dnevni Telegraf was shot dead in front of his house,
Al Capone-style).
There is no going back, panic has finally become fully justifiable.
---
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UQ: Space suits and skin diseases
25 Apr 1999
I am not too sure about the source of the document. I have reproduced it
in its entirety, forwarded to me by Kalyan
---
Ed Campion / John Ira Petty
Johnson Space Center, Houston
April 23, 1999
Phone: 281/483-5111
RELEASE: J99-12
TWO SPECIAL GIRLS USE NASA SPACESUIT TECHNOLOGY TO FINALLY HAVE THEIR DAY
IN THE SUN
Next Monday may be just the start of another week for most people, but for
two little girls, it will be a red letter day as they do something most
people take for granted - the chance to go outside and play on a nice
sunny day.
The two girls, Amanda Clanton, 9, from Crosby, Texas and Erica Lumas, 6,
from Honduras, both suffer from what is known as xeroderma pigmentosum or,
XP disease. The girls can not tolerate exposure to either the sun?s strong
ultraviolet light or even bright indoor lighting and are forced to remain
inside, in darkened rooms all of the time.
All of that will change when the girls and their families meet Monday with
JSC officials along with representatives from the non-profit HED
Foundation and Related Disorders of Hampton, Virginia organization and
they each receive a special UV protection suit that was developed from
space-based technology.
The protective suits include a white jacket, pants, gloves and head gear,
including goggles. The external garments protect the children?s sensitive
skin from more than 99.9 percent of the sun?s UV rays. Underneath, the
children wear a small cooling support system, necessary because full-body
UV suits can get warm. The cooling unit has no moving parts, using 4 gel
packs in a vest-like garment. The gel packs can supply cooling for two to
four hours and can be recharged in a refrigerator in about 30 minutes.
The suits have made a huge impact in the lives of those who have used
them, enabling them to go outside in daylight for the first time. The HED
organization., through agreement with Johnson Space Center?s Office of
Technology Transfer and Commercialization, has begun providing suits to
the children who need them. It is estimated that several thousand children
around the world suffer from various diseases that cause either extreme
sensitivity to light or problems in cooling their bodies.
"It?s amazing to think that because NASA astronauts walk in space and on
the moon, children can now play in the sun," said Sarah Moody, the HED
Foundation?s founder and president. The suits are designed to cost under
$2,000 and are now available in various colors. Many families, after
years of having to deal with the restrictions of the child?s condition,
can live more normal lives.
The organization began in 1986, when Moody sought help from NASA?s Langley
Research Center, Hampton Virginia, in finding a cooling garment for her
nephew, who suffered from hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplastia (HED).
Victims of HED lack sweat glands, which can lead to heat stroke, heat
exhaustion and even death. The foundation also provides cooling garments
to children with multiple sclerosis, spina bifida, cerebral palsy and
other disorders.
A documentary on that use of technology was widely televised, resulting in
the creation of the foundation. Moody says people and organizations she
refers to as her Angels Network have made a huge difference.
In 1997, the Johnson Space Center, seeking a broader use for spacesuit
technology, offered Moody the concept for the UV-protection garment and a
fashion model donated money to the foundation. Word spread and more
donations came from other sources.
The first three suits distributed were prototypes provided by NASA. The
foundation has provided 15 additional UV suits, most to children suffering
from XP disease. The most recent was in January - it went to a 5-year-old
girl in Keystone Heights, Fla.
For more information, contact the HED Foundation at
Box 9421, Hampton, Va., 23670, or at
http://www.hedfoundation.org.
---
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UQ: Geophysical Electrophonics
21 Apr 1999
Geophysical Electrophonics is a field of research that was primarily
invented by Colin Keay, now at the Physics Department at the University of
Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia.
Definition:
The production of audible noises of various kinds through direct
conversion by transduction of very low frequency electromagnetic energy
generated by a number of geophysical phenomena.
The following is from a write-up on this phenomena:
---
The ability of a meteor or fireball to produce sound has never been
seriously doubted. When taken logically, any solid body entering the
atmosphere at hypervelocity is almost bound to make a noise because of its
collision with air molecules and the build-up of a bow shock wave in much
the same way that an aircraft will produce a sonic boom or a whip will
"crack" - but the situation is not as simple as it may at first seem.
Fireballs - officially, meteors brighter than mag -4.0 - are often
associated with sound and, indeed, have been for centuries. The great
fireball of 1676 March 21, for example, was accompanied by
"cannon-like" and "rattling" sounds together with a "hissing" noise.
If a fireball plunges low into the atmosphere and takes several
seconds to cross the observer's sky then conditions are favorable to
both see and hear the fireball simultaneously. The sounds may be
detected in the wrong order because of the location of the observer,
and the way sound is refracted and reflected by both the atmosphere
and the terrain, and some observers may not be able to hear the event
at all for the same reasons. But it was for many years generally
accepted that for to produce simultaneous sound and light phenomena
the fireball must enter the atmosphere at a low angle, have a diameter
in excess of 10 cm, plunge deep into the air and, therefore, be of the
robust asteroidal-, rather than the fragile cometary-type. Magnitudes
under such circumstances are brighter than -8.
If all audible fireballs fulfilled these conditions there would be few
problems. But many reports suggest high, swift objects, not as bright
as -8 and some considerably fainter and classed as meteors. On
numerous occasions it was the sound that caused the observer to look
up. An obstacle immediately becomes clear: light from a meteor at an
altitude of, say, 80 km (50 miles), would take only 0.0003 second to
reach the ground-based observer whereas sound waves would take in
excess of four minutes! Simultaneous observations of these two
phenomena are not, apparently, possible. The solution to this problem
may lie in the "hissing" sound that is often reported.
Havey H. Nininger in his classic book Out of the Sky recalls that in
1934 E.R.Weaver of the US Bureau of Standards suggested that
electromagnetic waves - or "ether waves" as Weaver called them - may
be produced by meteors and fireballs. These would then be transformed
into audible sound by objects such as buildings and cars. Though
ignored at the time, the proposal later received much attention, most
notably by Colin S.L. Keay of the University of Newcastle in New South
Wales, Australia.
Keay has investigated reports of "electrophonic" sound emitted by a
number of bright fireballs. In 1980 he showed that the plasma trail of
a large fireball could generate Extra Low and Very Low Frequency
(ELF/VLF) radio emissions in the range 1 to 10 kHz. His theory was
eventually verified in 1988 by three groups of Japanese observers who,
working together, managed to obtain simultaneous photographic and
radio observations of a bright fireball together with an electrophonic
sound report of the event.
While bright fireballs may be capable of producing electrophonic sound
there are still problems with the fainter meteors. It seems unlikely
that such a small object could produce enough energy to generate
ELF/VLF radio emissions, but reports do exist and need to be
satisfactorily explained.
The main objection to audible meteors is that humans cannot normally
hear electrophonic sound. But various theories have been proposed in
which sharp objects - such as aerials, wires and even blades of grass
- could convert any ELF/VLF emissions present into audible sound. In
effect, the meteor discharges its sound to the ground in the same way
that a charged cloud will discharge lightning - a common enough
occurrence. Another, though less likely explanation came from A.Paine
who speculated that sound may be quite common at certain wavelengths
that are outside the normal range of the human ear. He went on to
propose "bat-like" sensitivity under certain conditions.
It is interesting to note that the Inuit have a belief that aurorae -
which are caused by solar atomic particles interacting with the
Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere - can also be heard, despite
occurring at altitudes of 100 - 700 km where the air is too thin for
the transmission of sound. In Inuit mythology, aurorae are to souls of
the dead who, if you listen very carefully, will whisper to you.
Clearly, the same processes that make meteors audible may also account
for whispering aurorae.
Copyright 1996 Philip M. Bagnall
---
The Inuit are a tribe in North America (Canada) and are desparagingly
referred to as eskimoes. Moroever, the Inuit tribe also have the practice
of throat singing :-) See UQ, April 14th 1999 for more on throat singing.
All this was in theory and not verified until now. A Croatian astronomer
has now actually recorded these sounds scientifically in an experiment in
the open. He and his colleagues Slaven Garaj, Goran Zgrablic and a number
of others from the University of Zagreb, conducted these experiments in
Ulan Bator, Mongolia.
They were measuring the "sights and sounds" produced by the Leonids, the
shower of shooting stars that are seen when the Earth plunges through the
dust debris left by Comet Temple Tuttle as it circles the Sun. Their
results confirming the theory of electrophonic sound was presented in a
conference in San Francisco this week.
This what they had to say about their experiments conducted in -30 degress
centigrade.
"Our equipment was not sophisticated," he admits. "To protect the
microphones from wind noise, we just buried them in sealed wooden
boxes with a partition of aluminium or paper foil to act as a kind of
drum skin. Then we just covered them in snow and waited."
Their wait was rewarded after two frigid nights when the fireballs
started falling over the Mongolian steps. "We were just chatting
around midnight and suddenly a few happened," recalls Vinkovic.
"Then they just came, brighter and brighter. We stood there amazed. It
was complete madness. I've never seen fireballs so bright. You could
see your shadow - night turned to day."
Vikovic estimates they saw more than 30 fireballs in about five hours.
But this was a freak night that probably will not be repeated in our
lifetimes. "And the accompanying sounds are very rare," he stresses.
"The average person may expect to hear only one electrophonic fireball
in a lifetime, as long as they spend most of their night hours
outside."
Sources: BBC News Online April 18, 1999
http://www.ticetboo.demon.co.uk/audible.htm
http://users.hunterlink.net.au/~ddcsk/gelphonx.htm
--- Unquotidian Quotes: look beyond the horizon -----------
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friends but include this Copyright notice. To (un)subscribe
or add your friends email karu@vsnl.com -------------------
UQ: A new breed of viruses that could remove your privacy
19 Apr 1999
PGP (pretty good privacy) has been virtually established as a standard for
sending and receiving email, to secure privacy.
How PGP works is as follows:
Every user has a pair of keys (these are blocks of data). One is called
public key and the other is called private key. The public key is put up
for download somewhere. Typically it can put in your .plan so that when
someone does a finger on you, he can find your public key.
When user A wants to send a mail to B and wants it to be private, he
uses B's public key and encrypts it and sends the mail. B then uses his
private key and decrypts the mail.
A mail that has been encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted
using his private key.
The systems works beautifully, but has a slight problem. The encryption
keys are long sets of random numbers and are stored on hard disk. All
other data on the hard disk is nice ordered data like text files, binary
files and pictures. And these blocks of random sequences stand out, like a
"nun in a whorehouse" (thats borrowed from Rushdie, I think). An example
public key is given below:
---
mQCNAzJyxJkAAAEEAK8WSnLfW2dx6QJzeKwfyCwfRVoWHIMIVpoOnOUicWZuB8Lz
nH7bMMD0bf3rVlC9lXhBkl2jB7URVxE9KkPqLr486V/8jdRhboPnT/Ez8SnTMj2E
Rda/THQ1YU1qAwVs8DOUquJenpLbGkeVGWLrnOUE4kqMS0ahm4pmG+sJAv4ZAAUR
tCVEYXZpZCBMLiBBbGRyaWRnZSA8ZGxhY0BBbGRyaWRnZS5jb20+iQCVAwUQMnLE
94pmG+sJAv4ZAQE+1wP/bTzeknWrJwREfRaTt845FlLy1eW3/OPh0IlsBh1f3KNJ
4MTJYqIb6fJLqmXHTARpLvdR/F/m74cLylfXqLWP9NT4T0Cy3Xf3qU9dZtqhEyU5
ZnKjB13pL0krWMXcT/rokAb9ZzYXXFBXZrFI6gcg5Ro6BAI9/OMEGZ+qPORmFsQ=
=TVIG
---
It is easy for a malicious program to scan for these data and spread it
out and mail it to someone who wants to read your private mail. And this
malicous program can spread as a virus.
Adi Shamir of the Weizmann Science Institute, in Rehovot, Israel, and
Nicko van Someron of NCipher, Cambridge, U.K. have published a paper on
this and have said it is practically implementable. Shamir is one of the
inventors of the RSA algorithm on which PGP is based.
The abstract of the paper is reproduced below. The paper is very readable
and easy to understand and reads like a manual for hobbyist virus writers!
---
Playing hide and seek with stored keys
Adi Shamir * and Nicko van Someren * September 22, 1998
Abstract
In this paper we consider the problem of efficiently locating
cryptographic keys hidden in gigabytes of data, such as the complete file
system of a typical PC. We describe efficient algebraic attacks which can
locate secret RSA keys in long bit strings, and more general statistical
attacks which can find arbitrary cryptographic keys embedded in large
programs. These techniques can be used to apply lunchtime attacks on
signature keys used by financial institutes, or to defeat authenticode
type mechanisms in software packages.
Keywords: Cryptanalysis, lunchtime attacks, RSA, authen-ticode,
key hiding.
---
You can download full paper at:
www.ncipher.com/products/files/papers/anguilla/keyhide2.pdf
I read in a recent issue of New Scientist, that such a program will take
merely 45 minutes to detect all the encryption keys on a 4 Gb harddisk.
One way to avoid the problem, is to encrypt all the data on the disk
including the virtual memory.
--- Unquotidian Quotes: look beyond the horizon -----------
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Copyright (C)1999 Karthikeyan. Feel free to forward to your
friends but include this Copyright notice. To (un)subscribe
or add your friends email karu@vsnl.com -------------------
UQ: vmware
18 Apr 1999
VMware is a software that allows you to run multiple operating systems
concurrently on the same machine - X86 only. Ranga pointed out thier
website to me. At first glance, it did seem earth shattering.
But, "That don't impress me much"
I'll first give you some of the facts on their web page:
---
Who We Are: An innovative software company based in Palo Alto,
California. VMware is a private, pre-IPO company.
Our Mission: To shatter the limits of personal computing, allowing
developers and end users to be more productive and innovative than
ever before.
What We Offer: VMware software allows you to:
* Run multiple operating systems concurrently on a single PC without
repartitioning or rebooting.
* Interoperate among each of these operating systems.
* Isolate and protect each operating environment, and the
applications and data that are running in it.
* Encapsulate and manipulate each operating environment, and have
the availability to roll back and restart, or move an environment
among differently configured machines.
---
What it actually is:
It is a software that runs atop your existing operating system and most
importantly, it has a list of "guest operating systems" that are
supported. From their mission statement and quick facts, the impression I
first got was like, VMware treats new OS's like binaries and as long as
the OS is for x86 arch, VMware will run it. But that is NOT the case.
VMware has to explicitly support the OS.
So it seems to me to be mearly a layer atop the OS. There are tall claims
that it natively does things on the processor, devices are separated
between OS's, one OS can crash but others will continue etc. But to me all
this is no big deal.
An OS is afterall a peice of software. The x86 architecture provides
for multitasking. So it is really no big deal, that there exists a
software that multitasks Operating Systems. It is just that these guys
have done it.
And last but not the least, the product doesn't have much use. The
technical fundas behind the software don't really impress me much. It
seems a little more than an emulator.
You can make your own judgement. Go to www.vmware.com
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friends but include this Copyright notice. To (un)subscribe
or add your friends email karu@vsnl.com -------------------
UQ: origami, tesselation and structures!
17 Apr 1999
I read this article recently in an issue of Scientific American. It dealt
with a grand marraige of tesselation and of all things structures! The
rest of the mail basically paraphrases that article.
One of the phenomenon that bothers structural engineers in civil
engineering and mechanical engineering is the strenth of columns. When
columns are subjected to loads they withstand that load upto a certain
point and then catastrophically deforms into a mess suddenly.
Consider a cylindrical shell in the form of a column. The shape of
buckling can actually be studied by placing a smaller cylinder inside this
cylinder so that the buckling just starts and we can observe the shape
into which the thin metal buckles.
The shape and creases are very similar to what you get by repeatedly
folding a square into smaller and smaller triangles along its diagonal.
Unfold the paper and roll it up as cylinder. The creases give the way the
cylinder buckles. At the creases the metal will fall outward and along the
diagonal of each smaller sqaure which is uncreased the metal buckles
inward. Just try it out and you'll understand what I mean.
Now we will go on to tesselation. It has been known that there are only 3
regular tesselations. A regular tesselation is one in which only regular
polygons of the same size are used to cover up the 2d infinite plane. The
3 such polygons are triangle, sqaure and hexagon.
It was also proved in 1850s by Ludwig Schlafli that there are precisely 8
uniform, "semi-regular" tesselations. These are tesselations of regular
polygons but not neccesarily identical. It is surprising to me that there
are only 8 such. Infact Schlafli also made a notation for denoting these.
Take any vertex in the tesselation and consider the polygons at
that vertex clockwise and note down the number of edges it has.
So for example, 3^4, 6 will denote the tesselation which has at each
vertex 4 consecutive triangles and a hexagon. See gif below which shows
the actual tesselation for 3^2.4.3.4.
Now we will go on to using them. Consider a tesselation and take each edge
in it. The edge can either be folded vertically or horizontally without
folding another polygon inside its face. For certain tesselations each
edge can be folded only horizontally or only vertically. Example - a
series of squares. If you try to fold in both ways, where the creases meet
they will bend out of their plane.
In 1989, it was proved that no tesselation which had there edges meet at a
vertex can be folded in both ways. This rules out 6^3, 3.12^2, 4.6.12,
4.8^2.
Consider instead 3^6, 3^3.4^2, 3^3.4.3.4. These can be folded in both ways
and also can be wrapped around a cylinder. What we can do with these
tessellation is that, take each edge and either push it in or push it out.
We can do this only in a finite number of ways. This is then wrapped
around the cylinder.
And not surprisingly some of these configurations resemble closely
buckling patterns observed in hollow cyclindrical and box columns!
Moreover, the buckling can be modeled on a computer by pretending that the
flat tiles in the tessellation are hinged together by some kind of spring
at the connecting edge. Such models are very useful to study box columns
which are used in building constructions.
You can find the full article at:
Scientific American, February 1999, pp 80-81.
--- Unquotidian Quotes: look beyond the horizon -----------
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Copyright (C)1999 Karthikeyan. Feel free to forward to your
friends but include this Copyright notice. To (un)subscribe
or add your friends email karu@vsnl.com -------------------
UQ: Tuva, Feynman and throat singing
14 Apr 1999
Tuva is small country in central Asia between Russia and Mongolia. It
caught the attention of the physics Nobel laureate Richard Feynman in the
1930s. In what has been described as a "philatelic orgy," Tuva issued a
number of off-the-wall stamps in odd shapes (triangles, diamonds, etc.)
showing odd scenes (men on camels racing trains, men on horseback hunting
with airplanes above them, etc.).
This was what caught the attention of Richard Feynman back then.
In 1977, he renewed his interest and wondered what happened to Tuva and
discussed it with his friend and bongo collaborater Ralph Leighton. They
found it on the atlas and decided to go to Tuva. By then it was annexed by
Russia and getting a visa to travel there was very difficult.
It was then that Feynman made his war cry, Tuva or Bust and made it his
goal in life to visit Tuva. Leighton made the following comments about
this:
"I thought when we adopted this rallying cry, Tuva or bust, it was
this serious thing. We have got to make it to Tuva no matter what,
and I also thought the way you measured success was whether you
made it to your goal or not. Now I realize after he died that he
didn't really care much if he got there. He enjoyed the journey
along the way."
Tragically mere weeks before they got their visas Feynman died becuase of
stomach cancer. But Leighton did make a journey to Tuva. He has chronicled
his journey in his book "Tuva or Bust"
Feynman is a very revered person in Tuva because of the interest he
stirred in that small country. Tuva has even issued a commemorative
stamp in honor of Feynman, showing a pair of hands playing the bongos and
a ``Feynman diagram'' - a shorthand that Feynman invented to visualize
quantum physics interactions. Feynman was given the Nobel prize for this
visualisation scheme he developed for quantum physics.
There is a very queer practice of throat singing in Tuva - generating more
than one tone at the same time while singing. The most prominent Tuva
artist now is Kongar-ol-Ondar who can make upto 4 notes at the same time.
He has produced an album called Back Tuva Future available from amazon.com
for 13 dollars. It contains 14 tracks with collabrations from Blues singer
Paul Pena and some rap artists. It has got very good reviews on the
amazon.com page. I have reproduced some of those comments here:
---
A music fan from Chicago, Illinois , March 13, 1999 5 out of 5 stars
Much more than a novelty
I bought this CD with the expectation that it would be a very
interesting well done recording (I know Dave Hoffner's work and I'm a
Richard Feynman fan) that would introduce me to something new. What I
got was much more! I got a collection of music that I play as often as
any of my other favorite recordings.
Ondar's singing of three notes at the same time is incredible (easy to
make out on the opening to "Two Lands, One Tribe) but the biggest
surprise was how rhythmic the music is.
I love this CD
---
A music fan from South Central Texas , March 9, 1999 5 out of 5 stars
fascinating and mentally energizing
I first herd this music while on a country road heading toward work. I
was so excited by the throat singing, I deliberately tarried, refused
to go to work before the NPR broadcast featuring this album ended.
What a delight.
---
Some of the comments have been so nice though:
A music fan from Ohio,USA , March 6, 1999 1 out of 5 stars
I did not like it.
I can't believe what is on the music market anymore. This sounds like
something that elementary boys would do to get attention drawn to
themselves.
---
But from what I have read about Ondar, Back Tuva future isn't the real
Tuvan throat singing. If you want to listen to that you can get the CD:
Deep In The Heart Of Tuva. It has 20 tracks, costs 18$ and you can listen
to realaudio samples at amazon.com
The reviews for this CD have been very good.
---
salama@pinos.com from Buenos Aires, Argentina , January 17, 1999 5 out
of 5 stars
Terrific CD features a little known musical tradition
This CD is truly spectacular. It features 20 tracks of Tuvan throat
singing, one of the most unique music traditions of the world.
Originating from Tuva, an exotic Russian republic north of Mongolia,
throat singing may be best compared to Tibetan Chant, but it has a
fascination of its own. (The Tuvans are buddhists of Mongolian stock).
The CD features unaccompanied throat singing (tracks 1 to 8), singing
accompanied by traditional instruments (track 9 to 12), and in what
may be the most fascinating tracks of the CD (13 to 20), a blend of
throat singing with other musical styles, like Bulgarian folk music,
blues and rock (!). And if this isn't enough to go to the record
store, the CD is also accompanied by a superb booklet that tells
everything one wants to know about Tuva and its singing.
---
cooper1@ufl.edu from Gainesville, FL , September 11, 1998 5 out of 5
stars
One of the best Cd's i own
This CD is awesome. I found it over a year ago and still listen to it
on a regular basis. The #2 track pulled me in, and the rest was so
cool I had to buy it. The music is like nothing you have EVER heard
before. If you're like me and like many different kinds of music, then
i would recommend this CD for you. It comes with a little book that
provides information on tuvan culture and a tutorial on how to throat
sing. Check out tracks 2, 14, 19, and 20. These are my personal
favorites.
---
Tuvan throat singing has been embraced by and captivated many singers
including Frank Zappa. A documentary of Tuva and their throat singing has
been produced. It is called "Genghis Blues" available from www.feynman.com
(Tuva trader)
I first heard of Ondar and Tuva watching CNN Worldbeat and then got all
this other information from the web. I also heard some snatches of the
music on CNN Worldbeat. It is really mesmerising. You can find a sample
real audio file of Ondar singing here
http://www.seattlesquare.com/folklife/ondar.ram
There is a whole lot of information on Tuva at the
www.feynman.com website - it is dedicated to Tuva culture. It also makes a
newsletter about Tuva culture.
There is a very detailed tutorial on Tuva singing which you can download
at:
http://www.feynman.com/tuva/txt/music/theory.html
I have included that file to this mail to save you guys the trouble of
download!
Sources: CNN Worldbeat
http://www.feynman.com/tuva/txt/music/theory.html
http://www.seattlesquare.com/folklife/ondar.ram
http://feynman.com/trader/
http://feynman.com/tuva/txt/newsletter/
amazon.com
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Copyright (C)1999 Karthikeyan. Feel free to forward to your
friends but include this Copyright notice. To (un)subscribe
or add your friends email karu@vsnl.com -------------------
Khoomei-Singing Boy
Khoomei - How To's And Why's
By Michael Emory
During the past year I have learned techniques of some throat-singing
styles as practiced in Central Asia. With guidance from Maj. P.C.
(Ret.), and access to his collection of vocal recordings from that
part of the world, I have experienced fair success in executing the
forms described below. The following is intended to offer instruction
to anyone with interest and patience enough to learn a way to refine
self-generated sound. Previous voice training is not required. I would
be delighted to hear of someone able to throat-sing while having
listened to no recordings.
Much of learning to throat-sing is dependent upon the recognition of
an existing subtlety of one tone among many. When you hear this and
find where it is and is not, you may listen as it gains clarity and
power. In this manner I was able to produce two harmonics with melody
soon after hearing the khoomei-borbangy of Mr. Kaigal-ool Khovalyg. I
already had been ending medleys of style with the required position
simply because it felt correct.
Variation in the character of throat singing styles is dictated by
careful positioning and movement of the tongue, lips, and jaw. These
control pitch, timbre, and (in one case) suppression of harmonic
overtones. Also necessary is a tightening of throat muscles to
restrict the fundamental (lower, normal) tone. This allows generated
overtones to dominate that which is heard. A faint harmonic melody can
be produced above a relaxed and normally sung tone. With recognition
of this possibility comes a realization that many singing styles
consciously utilize harmonics for dramatic effect.
The style of kargyraa differs in that another vibration is required of
the throat.
Khoomei, basic - begin by producing a long, steady note with an open,
relaxed mouth and throat. by altering lip and tongue positions to say
vowels, ``oooo... ohhh.... ayyy.... ahhh..... eeee....'', you will
hear different overtones in ascending pitch. Cupping a hand to your
ear may help you to identify these initially. Maintain one tone as you
tighten your throat and stomach muscles slightly. If you choke, try a
lower fundamental. If you begin coughing, go into this tightening over
a period of time to avoid damage to your voice. Hard coughing is
punishing to vocal cords.
You should now be making ``electronic'' sounding vowels. If any of
these are extended with subtle changes to the tongue, lips, or jaw
(changing one element at a time as in any controlled experiment),
separate overtones will gain definition. The sounds you create are
feedback leading to finer mouth control.
It may be difficult to sort out the overtones created by each
position. Discover them as you work out a scale above one steady
fundamental. Eventually simple melodies will emerge within a limited
range. As you consciously create melody, avoid the temptation to alter
the fundamental. This is basic khoomei.
Sygyt - with your throat tightened, sing an ``e'' vowel at a
comfortable pitch. Shift the jaw slightly forward and partially close
the mouth with lips protruded. You should hear a drop in the pitch of
the harmonic. As the sides of the tongue are held against upper
premolars push sound between tongue and palate. By adjusting your lips
different notes will emerge. Flexing the middle of the tongue up and
down lends a wider range, greater definition and more drive to
produced tones. Keep the tongue sides in contact with teeth to
maintain a separate upper cavity in which overtones are generated.
This is the position for sygyt used by Tuvan singers.
A similar style places the tongue higher on the palate or with the
tongue-tip folded back. I believe that Mongolian singers favor this
position.
Khoomei-borbangy - if you are able to produce a very relaxed and clear
khoomei melody by varying tongue position but without jaw or lip
shifts, you may begin hearing a second overtone. This is audible at a
pitch between the fundamental and the melodic overtone. A third,
higher, ringing overtone may also emerge (most people find it a
painful curiosity only, some people think that of all throat-singing).
Tongue movement to create melody must remain low in the mouth to avoid
interference with the lower, more subtle harmonic. It is simplest to
keep the tip rested at the base of the lower incisors while gently
flexing the middle of the tongue. With practice comes greater freedom
of movement. The jaw should be held forward and fairly rigid as the
lips are held loosely at an ``ohh'' position. On the verge of
relaxation your lips should quiver lightly and rapidly. A slight
opening or closing movement of the jaw may help initiate this
movement. This fine balance is an elusive state and should be allowed
to happen passively on your part. If it once happens, simply try to
recreate the conditions which led to its occurrence. Warm up by
singing in the other styles, your lips may respond more readily.
Fine control will take time to develop. The result is a pulsating
overtone adding richness to a remote sounding, fluting melody.
Kargyraa - this style relies upon vibrations other than those normally
produced by the vocal cords. A low fundamental is used to create a
powerful percussive sounds. Harmonics are created in an open mouth as
in basic khoomei. Use jaw and lip changes freely. It is easy to
combine this with sygyt to create chylandyk.
While able to perform kargyraa, I cannot explain the mechanism used in
its production. A tightening of part of the throat is involved as is a
push from the diaphragm. [Forcing more air through a restricted
passageway would accelerate it and may act to overload the vocal
cords, changing their vibration frequency?] As my singing practice
continues I realize that an ability to relax the lower portions of the
throat allows surfaces deeper in the chest to resonate and enhance
tonal quality. Sygyt singing is a very good warm up for kargyraa.
Kargyraa may be learned by ``huffing'' air forcefully at the lowest
pitch you can create, or at some level below that recognizable note.
In time you should feel a regular percussive movement. When you find
that you can engage that ``motor'', rise the pitch until clear
overtones emerge. The amount of expelled air needed to sing passages
of length may seem daunting at first. With practice you will expend
less breath in generating desired sounds and can sing for longer
periods. Achieving the correct throat movement is the more difficult
aspect of kargyraa. As I shift from a normally sung vowel into this
movement, I tighten my throat and stomach slightly, As I go from
khoomei to kargyraa, I open the upper throat.
Bicycle kargyraa - closely related to steppe-kargyraa but performed
best on a smoothly paved road of little traffic. I am presently at
work on this technique and leave it to the affluent to develop
``convertible kargyraa''.
Staircase khoomei (all forms) - good acoustics if enclosed. This is a
fine practice environment, better if you live alone. This and
``kitchen kargyraa'' are actually subdivisions of ``home khoomei''.
Dairy products should be avoided before singing as they create mucous
in the throat. Milk chocolate seems to be especially effective at
this.
As mentioned above, the new sensations your throat will experience was
you initially try throat-singing will likely bring on coughing; it
tickles. Until your throat becomes accustomed to this you should not
push too rapidly. Do only a little each day. Throat-singing is good
for your voice, sustained coughing is not.
Why?
Therapeutic aspects - as a biological feedback element khoomei has
much advantage over other indicators. It is portable and needs no
external power source --- just add atmosphere. It is invisible and may
(or should) be as private as you wish. It reflects nicely from the
inside of an auto windshield - when stuck in traffic, sing. The best
Tuvan throat singers started as truck drivers.
Vitality - khoomei will add color you your cheeks. Diligent practice
of khoomei will enrich your speaking voice. Two out of three women
prefer a khoomei man.
Inter-specific effects - sygyt will freeze a squirrel and bring about
a floor-belly slink in a cat. Kargyraa will cause a dog to seek an
oblique horizon or to counter vocalize.
Guerilla khoomei - stand near people as a motor or other humming thing
passes, match its fundamental frequency, and see how much secret
singing can be done. Sygyt can be easily denied: ``it came from
elsewhere!''. Got guts? Try kargyraa.
Thrill seeking - [see ``bicycle kargyraa'' above].
UQ: entomophagy!
13 Apr 1999
--- UQ news
Sony's case against a small company called Bleem which made the
Playstation emulator has been rejected by a Federal court and Bleem has
started shipping its commercial version.
See related UQ - Feb 14th
---
I came across a review of a book titled, "Man Eating Bugs : The Art and
Science of Eating Insects" by Peter Menzel, Faith D'Aluisio. The review
was very interesting and it said the book had photographs of people eating
insects including things like live tarantula! That was where I came
across the word entomophagy. I then did a search on hotbot to come up with
a lot of interesting stuff.
entomophagy means the practice of eating insects.
I found this on some entomophagy forum:
if you call 1-800-EAT-WORM (no kiddng), a very pleasant,
ordinary-sounding receptionist will describe their food products (for
now, centering mostly on novelty lollipops and a product called
Larvets, made from mealyworms for your "snacking enjoyment in three
mouth-watering flavors: BBQ, Cheddar Cheese and Mexican Spice".
"Almost no fat, all protein." Soon the firm will begin adding
scorpions to their product line, "mostly because of big demand among
the Japanese," she said.). She'll also tell you a little about the
insect-farming operation and send you a brochure.
A company called grubco has much more variety and a lot of information on
their website. Go to http://www.herp.com/grubco/grubco.html for full
details. They have a list of all their items and the cost. It even had the
nutritional details of each of the insects. I have read everywhere that
insects are a huge source of protien. You can check out the actual numbers
below.
Crickets Mealworms Waxworms Superworms Fly Larva
Moisture 68.96 62.89 60.97 58.91 69.02
Ash 1.52 1.20 0.97 1.29 1.24
Protein 20.72 18.65 15.40 18.92 15.32
Fat 5.74 13.64 20.12 15.07 5.96
Carbohydrates 3.06 3.62 2.54 5.81 8.46
mg/100g Calc. 21.53 3.28 13.14 10.80 17.73
mg/kg Vit. C 105.90 38.10 23.60 9.80 9.80
Dietary Fiber 2.80 2.00 1.60 2.20 2.70
Calories/Fat 51.66 122.76 181.08 135.63 53.64
The first 5 lines are in percentage. So for protien rich food start
munching on insects. To get you started I have included some recipies
below.
---
Bee Grubs in Coconut Cream (Mang Non Won)
Marinate bee grubs, sliced onions and citrus leaves in coconut cream
containing some pepper. Wrap in pieces of linen and steam. Serve as a
topping for rice.
---
Chocolate Covered Crickets
* 2 Squares of semisweet chocolate
* 25 dry-roasted crickets and/or grasshoppers with legs and wings
removed
Melt chocolate as directed on the box. Dip insects in chocolate, place
on wax paper and refrigerate.
Insect preparation: To clean insects, place in a colander or fine mesh
strainer, rinse and pat dry. Dry roast in a 300-degree oven until
crispy. They can be ground into flour, cut into pieces or served
whole.
---
Grasshopper Fritters
* 3/4 cup sifted flower
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 3/4 cups milk
* 1 egg slightly beaten
* 1 cup grasshoppers
Sift flour, baking powder and salt together into a bowl. Slowly add
milk and beat until smooth. Add egg and beat well. Pluck off
grasshopper wings and legs, heads optional. Dip insects in egg batter
and deep fry. Salt and serve.
---
Parcht Locusts
Locusts and grasshoppers are prepared for cooking by removing the
wings, the small legs, and the distal portion of the hind legs. Then
pull off the head, withdrawing any attached viscera.
Boil prepared Rocky Mountain locusts in salted water. Add assorted
cut-up vegetables, butter, salt and vinegar to the broth and cook
until the vegetables are tender. Serve as a thick soup or over boiled
rice as a main dish.
---
Toffee Surprise
* 3/4 cup tightly packed brown sugar
* 1/3 cup butter
* 1/2 cup live mealworms (you can get them at a pet shop or bait
shop)
* 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips
* colander
* paper towel
* cookie sheet
* 9-inch square baking pan
Mealworms come in a container with either bran or crumpled newspaper.
To separate the mealworms from the packing material, place in colander
and gently toss. Remove dead mealworms and any other bits of debris.
Wash mealworms in colander under cool water. Place on paper towel and
pat dry. They are now ready for cooking.
Place paper towel on cookie sheet. Spread mealworms on paper towel and
place in 200-degree oven for one to two hours until they are
thoroughly dry and crunchy. They are now dry roasted.
Butter baking pan. Coarsely chop dry-roasted mealworms and set aside.
Carefully heat sugar and butter in saucepan until boiling. Stir over
medium heat for seven minutes. Remove from heat and stir in roasted
insects. Pour into pan.
Sprinkle chocolate chips over hot mixture and cover pan for five
minutes or until chocolate melts. Remove cover and spread melted
chocolate evenly over toffee. While still warm, cut into 1 1/2-inch
squares. Refrigerate until firm.
Enjoy :-)
To end, I have included the review of the book available at Amazon.com
---
Conventional wisdom holds that our dietary habits are mostly set by
the time we reach age 5. Perhaps this explains why the thought of
eating insects sends the average Westerner into a fit of shudders and
gagging. But entomophagy is practiced by all kinds of people, all over
the world. Arthropods are a good source of protein, they're plentiful,
and they're often easier to catch than a fast bird or dangerous
mammal. Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, the husband-wife team behind
the photojournalistic masterpieces Material World and Women in the
Material World, bring us the world of insect eating through stunning
photos and amusing, enlightening text, complete with recipes for
delicacies like Simple Scorpion Soup. Peter dives into each insect
meal with gusto, whereas Faith is always less enthusiastic, but
participates nonetheless, if only to push her Western taste boundaries
out a bit further. Here she describes her first taste of a fried
tarantula in Cambodia: "I can stall no longer. I break off a leg--it's
two inches long, but seems like twelve--and ask if this too is
supposed to be eaten. Yes, I'm told, so I do. I'm surprised that it
doesn't feel hairy in my mouth because it looks awfully hairy.... It
doesn't taste bad, but I can't say it tastes good."
Man Eating Bugs is part global anthropological study, part nature
essay, part travel adventure story. The plentiful, gorgeous
photographs will take you on an emotional journey, from the depths of
disgust to the heights of awe, as you realize that "the shelves of the
supermarket carry only a small slice of what the world has to offer."
--Therese Littleton
---
Infact at amazon, all the reviewers had rated as 5 out of 5 stars. First
book I have seen like this.
If you any of you actually get to make any of these recipes, please let me
know how they taste. If you get your hands on the book, try scanning the
photos and passing them on to me. (provided it doesn't violate any
copyright laws :-) )
--- Unquotidian Quotes: look beyond the horizon -----------
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Copyright (C)1999 Karthikeyan. Feel free to forward to your
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UQ: The Kosovo war - a quagmire getting murkier and murkier
11 Apr 1999
What could possibly be the first rifts in the NATO alliance surfaced
yesterday. It wasn't a story very widely reported and I saw it only on
BBC. Curiously it was blotted out on all the American news channels.
It was about the atrocious usage of weapons with radioactive components in
NATO's war against Yugoslavia.
These weapons are munitions with depleted uranium (DU) which is a
byproduct of the uranium enrichment process. The fears and doubts have
arised after NATO started using A-10 jets to target tanks in Yugoslavia.
These same jets were used in the Gulf War against Iraqi troops and at that
time, they fired 30mm rounds with DU shells.
DU is 1.7 times more dense than lead and is used in an alloy form in
shells to make them better penetrate targets.
John Catalinottto of the International Action Center in New York, set up
by former US Attorney-General Ramsey Clark and others to oppose US
military involvement around the world, said: "As the shell hits its
target, it burns and releases uranium oxide into the air.
"The poisonous and radioactive uranium is most dangerous when inhaled
into the body, where it will release radiation during the life of the
person who inhaled it."
The IAC said the Pentagon's decision to use the A-10s in the conflict was
"a danger to the people and environment of the entire Balkans".
And it claimed "solid scientific evidence" that DU residues in southern
Iraq are responsible for a large increase in stillbirths, birth defects,
childhood leukaemia and other cancers.
The Gulf War Syndrome is blamed partly on the radiation exposure that the
Allied troops faced in Iraq. Both the US and Britain have severly denied
that, this could be a possible reason.
But the problem for the US, is that, this kind of blind support is not
being seen in this war. The British Defense ministry hasn't given a
categorical denial that DU munitions are not being used. The Ministry of
Defence merely said it did not think DU weapons were being used by NATO.
Worse still was what Labour MP Tom Dalywll said. Mr Dalyell, who opposes
the use of force against Yugoslavia, told BBC News Online he thought it
was "more than possible"
People outside NATO have been stronger in thier criticism. Russia's
Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov says he believes NATO forces may be using
weapons containing radioactivity against Yugoslavia.
"In a number of areas of Kosovo, experts have detected enhanced radiation
levels in the atmosphere and on the ground," Mr Ivanov said.
"This gives grounds for thinking that NATO may be using new types of
weapons against Yugoslavia, ones with radioactive components."
Apart from this problem, we have the peculiar situation of NATO and the US
obviously waging war against a small country and at the same time,
maintaining that they are not in war.
In the US, for the President to send American troops somewhere and
officially wage war, sanction is required from Congress. Which Mr.
Clinton has NOT even thought of doing. But bombs from US planes are
raining down everyday on that small country.
The US refuses to ackowledge it is at war and admantly sticks to its stand
that the 3 captured soldiers are not Prisoners of War (POW). According to
the Geneva Convention, POWs dont have to be returned until the end of
hostilities. Mr Clinton doesn't want to wait that long. Instead we have
Clinton, mouthing banalities everyday like saying "Milosevic is
responsible for the well being of the soldiers." They are trying to
communicate with Yugoslvia through diplomatic channels. Since the US has
no diplomatic presence in Yugoslavia, they tried to go through Sweedish
diplomats which Yugoslavia did not respond to.
In what is obviously a diplomatic blunder or just pure arrogance, the
independent diplomatic initiative of the Cypriot parliamentary speaker
Kyprianou was rudely spurned. NATO refused to suspend bombing when he went
to secure 3 NATO prisoners from Yugoslvia. Instead we had the horrendous
scene of him meeting with Mr Milosevic for 90 minutes try to get the
release of the 3 NATO soldiers and at the same time, NATO bombing all
sorts of civilian targets. Deservedly NATO got a severe tongue lashing
from Mr Kyprianou.
Also in this war we have the amazing situation of the Commander-in-Chief
of the US being involved in a war as part-time business. I have never come
across a situation of a country waging war and at the same time
entertaining the Head of State of the world's most populous country (Zhu
Rongji - Premier of China). Worse still, the two have diametrically
opposite views on this war. I saw the amazing scene of the entire US
foreign policy top brass, including President, VP, and Secretary of State
in a state dinner for the Chinese Premier enjoying life. Didn't look to me
like this country was in a war which had resulted in over 200,000 people
losing their homes and 3 neighbour countries being pushed to the edge of
civil unrest.
I believe the diplomatic blunder of bombing Yugoslavia with Mr Kyprianou
bargaining for the 3 soldiers is because the US thinktank was too busy
looking after Mr Zhu, they had no time to think over what to do about a
war they started as a pass time. Mr Zhu visit is for 9 days. So forget
any sensible decision in those days. Not that this US administration is
capable of sensible decision without other distractions.
Also on Friday, the US Commander-in-Chief Bill Clinton said he believes
they can meet their objectives without ground troops. He has been saying
this for 16 days now. But Gen Klauss Naumann, chairman of NATO's military
committee said, "it will be very, very difficult."
There were further blunders by NATO. This time from Britain. As far as I
can see, the 16 days of bombing hasn't weakened Yugoslavia one bit. NATO's
is still afraid to send low altitude aircrafts and helicopters because the
air defense systems of Yugoslavia are still good. Which is why most of
the attacks are by cruise missiles - which are in short supply and costly.
Yugoslavian troops have almost emptied Kosovo of the ethnic Albanians.
Macedonia has closed its border and has refused to take any more refugees.
There is a huge humanitarian crisis in the region and Macedonian leaders
are openly saying they fear civil unrest.
Amdist this grim scenario Britain hardened its stand! British PM, Tony
Blair said, mere autonomy for Kosovo inside the Yugoslavian republic is
unaccpetable. He said, Kosovo should be given independence.
Britain further rudely critizied Macedonia for its treatment of the
refugee crisis it is facing. British Secretary of State for International
Development Clare Short said:
"We remain concerned that refugees in Macedonia are being forced onto
planes and buses. This is unacceptable. We understand Macedonian
concerns and will provide support to Macedonia, provided it complies
with international rights and norms in its treatment of refugees."
I dont really understand what these British bastard mean by sitting miles
away in their cozy home critizing a small country facing unneccassary
problem all because the western arms lobby decided to get a war going.
That too when Macedonia is doing what best it can.
The Macedonian authorities rejected international criticism of the way it
was handling the refugees.
The worst part is yet to come. A week back Russia sent a spy ship to the
Mediterranean. NATO has accused Russia of sharing information with
Yugoslavia which Russia has denied.
Also Boris Yeltsin made some strong comments on the situation.
"I told NATO, the Americans, the Germans: Don't push us towards
military action. Otherwise, there will be a European war for sure and
possibly world war," Yeltsin said in a meeting with regional leaders.
"They (NATO) want to bring in ground troops, they are preparing for
that, they want simply to seize Yugoslavia to make it their
protectorate ... we cannot let that happen to Yugoslavia," Yeltsin
said.
In Russia there are moves on to impeach Yeltsin on April 15th. The Duma is
dominated by communists and nationalists who have already called for
militarily supporting Yugoslavia in this war. So the situation here is
very fluid.
But Yeltsin spoke of the need for caution and diplomacy.
"I repeat again: Russia will not get involved if the Americans do not
push us," he said.
But Britain persisted in putting foot in mouth and shooting off nonsense
again
"It cannot be in Russia's long-term interest to isolate itself in the
Balkans with (Yugoslav President Slobodan) Milosevic at a time
****when he
himself is more isolated than ever among the countries in the region,"
***** (emphasis mine)
British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said in London Friday.
NATO doesnt seem to realise that they are the only 19 nations among more
than 200 nations in the world supporting this war. More than half the
population of the world (India + China) has unequivocally criticised this
war. None of the Balkan countries have supported this war. They are all
neutral. NATO is the isolated party here.
In the meanwhile, there have been rumors that Russia has retargetted its
nuclear missiles on NATO countries. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov,
said he was unaware of any such Presidential order.
It should also be noted that Boris Yeltsin is a very unsteady President
and has often contradicted himself within days. So it is possible that he
did make such orders.
The worst part of this affair is that none of the NATO countries are
devoting thier full attention to this war. The biggest player seems to be
the least interested. The American Commander-in-Chief does not take
decisions based on what is good for the Kosovars or based on ground
realities. Instead his decisions are mostly based on what the American
public wants - reflected in numerous opinion polls. He is directing this
war and simultaneously working on entertaining the Premier of the world's
most populous country - trying to convince him to sign the WTO, ask him to
keep quite on Chinese campaing donations and stolen nuclear secrets.
Even the low level people are showing utter lack of interest. The Pentagon
spokesman during one briefing did not know that the army man accompanying
him was a General or Admiral and mistakenly said Admiral, till he was
corrected! This shows utter lack of communication and preparation. Coming
to a briefing which the entire world media is watching live without
knowing what rank your army man holds is pathetic.
This war seems to be heading to a worse conclusion than Vietnam. In one
sentence its being conducted without any direction and by leaders who lack
statemenship, credibility and simple common sense. What else explains the
reason behind sending Senator Bob Dole as a last ditch attempt to make a
breakthrough when NATO and Yugoslavia were still talking around 3 weeks
back and NATO hadn't started the war. The all American Senator knows as
much about the Balkans as I know about nuclear biology.
Sources: BBC Online NEWS, Friday, April 9, 1999
CNN News, April 10
CNN News, April 9
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Copyright (C)1999 Karthikeyan. Feel free to forward to your
friends but include this Copyright notice. To (un)subscribe
or add your friends email karu@vsnl.com -------------------
UQ: 30 years of the RFCs
10 Apr 1999
This article deals with the 30th anniversary of the RFCs. It is divided
into 4 parts. Fittingly it is the largest posting so far on UQ!
Part 0: What is an RFC?
Part 1: Article from Wired News on the 30th anniversary of the RFCs.
Part 2: RFC2555 which is the RFC released for the 30th anniversary
Part 3: RFC2468 - a remembrance for Jon Postel
--- Part 0
RFC = Request For Comments. These are documents that are written by
anybody on the internet to define a standard or add to a standard. These
are how standards are defined for the internet protocols. They were
started by the late Jon Postel (who died on 16th October 1998, age 55) and
he was the editor for 28 years.
The easiest way to look for and search for rfcs is at www.faqs.org/rfcs
That is what I use.
Make sure you read the end of part 2. It has some info on a book titled
"Favorite RFCs -- The First 30 Years" which is to be published.
--- Part 1
Birth of an RFC Nation
by Chris Oakes
3:00 a.m. 9.Apr.99.PDT
When Americans celebrate the gunpowder-powered birth of their country,
they do it by blowing things up -- but these days, they blow up things
in the sky instead of other people.
When the Internet's founding engineers celebrate the birth of the
process for standardizing the network's pervasive plumbing, they pull
out their own form of celebratory gunpowder.
To hail the renowned Request for Comments (RFC), a document process
central to the success of Internet standards that was later adopted by
other industries, the Net's founding engineers have invoked the RFC
itself for the ceremony.
"It's now been 30 years since the first RFCs were issued," writes
Steve Crocker, author of the first RFC. Crocker is one of the authors
of Wednesday's RFC 2555, entitled "30 Years of RFCs."
"At the time, I believed the notes were temporary and the entire
series would die off in a year or so once the network was running.
Thanks to the spectacular efforts of the entire community and the
perseverance and dedication of [Net mainstay and RFC Editor] Jon
Postel, [current RFC Editor] Joyce Reynolds, and their crew, the
humble series of requests for comments evolved and thrived."
According to Where Wizards Stay Up Late, by Katie Hafner and Matthew
Lyon, Crocker volunteered to take the meeting notes at an early
Arpanet meeting. To avoid sounding too declarative, he labeled the
note "Request for Comments" and sent it out.
The RFC became the key mechanism for sharing technical designs in the
Internet community and the archetype for other communities as well,
Crocker wrote.
Request for Comments submissions to the Net standards body, Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF), typically proposed standards for
various plumbing specs of the now-ubiquitous network of networks.
The documents discuss computer communication issues such as networking
protocols, procedures, programs, and concepts. If a technical RFC
gained enough interest, it evolved into an Internet standard.
The RFC document editing process originated with the late Net pioneer,
Jon Postel.
But as with RFC 2555, the documents also let the engineering community
stray from the technical into opinion, reminiscence, and sometimes
humor.
"Thirty years ago today, the first Request for Comments document, RFC
1, was published at UCLA," reads the introduction to RFC 2555. "This
was the first of a series that currently contains more than 2,500
documents on computer networking, collected, archived, and edited by
Jon Postel for 28 years.
"Jon has left us, but this 30th anniversary tribute to the RFC series
is assembled in grateful admiration for his massive contribution."
That introduction is followed by a series of recollections about the
RFC and Postel. Present RFC Editor Joyce K. Reynolds, Steve Crocker,
Jake Feinler, and current MCI exec Vint Cerf all chime in on this
oddly named, and often dry documentation process.
"[The RFC] brought documentation to what had been
whiteboard/blackboard and restaurant-napkin conversation," said Vint
Cerf. The spirit of the RFC, Cerf said, is to "get it right and be
liberal in what you accept, conservative in what you say." The RFC
also encouraged contributors to "share knowledge freely and reap a
bountiful harvest of information from others," he said.
"I was aware of the Request for Comments document series, with Jon as
the RFC editor," Reynolds wrote. "I really didn't know much of the
inner workings of what the task entailed. It was Jon's job, and he
quietly went about publishing documents for the [pre-Internet] Arpanet
community.
As she watched Postel trying to single-handedly manage an increasing
quantity of submissions for RFC publication, Reynolds told Postel that
he needed to "learn to let go," and delegate the review of RFCs to
others. He did, and Reynolds eventually inherited the job of RFC
editor.
"Thus began my indoctrination to the RFC publication series. Operating
systems and computers have changed over the years, but Jon's
perseverance about the consistency of the RFC style and quality of the
documents remained true."
On penning the first RFC, Crocker wrote, "It was a modest and entirely
forgettable memo, but it has significance because it was part of a
broad initiative whose impact is still with us today."
At the time RFC 1 was written, the forerunner of the Internet -- the
Arpanet -- was still being designed, noted Crocker. The forerunners of
the modern routers "were the size of a refrigerator and cost about
$100,000 in 1969 dollars."
Thirty years later, of course, the Net is an amazingly efficient
plug-and-play matrix of much cheaper and more ubiquitous computing and
communications equipment.
Thanks greatly to the RFC.
"Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice," Crocker wrote, "we succeeded beyond
our wildest dreams and our worst fears."
---
Network Working Group RFC Editor, et al.
Request for Comments: 2555 USC/ISI
Category: Informational 7 April 1999
30 Years of RFCs
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does
not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this
memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction.................................................. 2
2. Reflections................................................... 2
3. The First Pebble: Publication of RFC 1........................ 3
4. RFCs - The Great Conversation................................. 5
5. Reflecting on 30 years of RFCs................................ 9
6. Favorite RFCs -- The First 30 Years...........................14
7. Security Considerations.......................................15
8. Acknowledgments...............................................15
9. Authors' Addresses............................................15
10. APPENDIX - RFC 1..............................................17
11. Full Copyright Statement......................................18
RFC Editor, et al. Informational [Page 1]
RFC 2555 30 Years of RFCs 7 April 1999
1. Introduction - Robert Braden
Thirty years ago today, the first Request for Comments document,
RFC 1, was published at UCLA (ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1.txt).
This was the first of a series that currently contains more than 2500
documents on computer networking, collected, archived, and edited by
Jon Postel for 28 years. Jon has left us, but this 30th anniversary
tribute to the RFC series is assembled in grateful admiration for his
massive contribution.
The rest of this document contains a brief recollection from the
present RFC Editor Joyce K. Reynolds, followed by recollections from
three pioneers: Steve Crocker who wrote RFC 1, Vint Cerf whose long-
range vision continues to guide us, and Jake Feinler who played a key
role in the middle years of the RFC series.
2. Reflections - Joyce K. Reynolds
A very long time ago when I was dabbling in IP network number and
protocol parameter assignments with Jon Postel, gateways were still
"dumb", the Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) was in its infancy and
TOPS-20 was in its heyday. I was aware of the Request for Comments
(RFCs) document series, with Jon as the RFC Editor. I really didn't
know much of the innerworkings of what the task entailed. It was
Jon's job and he quietly went about publishing documents for the
ARPANET community.
Meanwhile, Jon and I would have meetings in his office to go over our
specific tasks of the day. One day, I began to notice that a pile of
folders sitting to one side of his desk seemed to be growing. A few
weeks later the pile had turned into two stacks of folders. I asked
him what they were. Apparently, they contained documents for RFC
publication. Jon was trying to keep up with the increasing quantity
of submissions for RFC publication.
I mentioned to him one day that he should learn to let go of some of
his work load and task it on to other people. He listened intently,
but didn't comment. The very next day, Jon wheeled a computer stand
into my office which was stacked with those documents from his desk
intended for RFC publication. He had a big Cheshire cat grin on his
face and stated, "I'm letting go!", and walked away.
At the top of the stack was a big red three ring notebook. Inside
contained the "NLS Textbook", which was prepared at ISI by Jon, Lynne
Sims and Linda Sato for use on ISI's TENEX and TOPS-20 systems. Upon
reading its contents, I learned that the NLS system was designed to
help people work with information on a computer. It included a wide
range of tools, from a simple set of commands for writing, reading
RFC Editor, et al. Informational [Page 2]
RFC 2555 30 Years of RFCs 7 April 1999
and printing documents to sophisticated methods for retrieving and
communication information. NLS was the system Jon used to write,
edit and create the RFCs. Thus began my indoctrination to the RFC
publication series.
Operating systems and computers have changed over the years, but
Jon's perseverance about the consistency of the RFC style and quality
of the documents remained true. Unfortunately, Jon did not live to
see the 30th Anniversary of this series that he unfailingly nurtured.
Yet, the spirit of the RFC publication series continues as we
approach the new millennium. Jon would be proud.
3. The First Pebble: Publication of RFC 1 - Steve Crocker
RFC 1, "Host Software", issued thirty years ago on April 7, 1969
outlined some thoughts and initial experiments. It was a modest and
entirely forgettable memo, but it has significance because it was
part of a broad initiative whose impact is still with us today.
At the time RFC 1 was written, the ARPANET was still under design.
Bolt, Beranek and Newman had won the all-important contract to build
and operate the Interface Message Processors or "IMPs", the
forerunners of the modern routers. They were each the size of a
refrigerator and cost about $100,000 in 1969 dollars.
The network was scheduled to be deployed among the research sites
supported by ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO).
The first four nodes were to be at UCLA, SRI, University of
California, Santa Barbara and University of Utah. The first
installation, at UCLA, was set for September 1, 1969.
Although there had been considerable planning of the topology, leased
lines, modems and IMPs, there was little organization or planning
regarding network applications. It was assumed the research sites
would figure it out. This turned out to be a brilliant management
decision at ARPA.
Previously, in the summer of 1968, a handful of graduate students and
staff members from the four sites were called together to discuss the
forthcoming network. There was only a basic outline. BBN had not
yet won the contract, and there was no technical specification for
the network's operation. At the first meeting, we scheduled future
meetings at each of the other laboratories, thus setting the stage
for today's thrice yearly movable feast. Over the next couple of
years, the group grew substantially and we found ourselves with
overflow crowds of fifty to a hundred people at Network Working Group
meetings. Compared to modern IETF meetings all over the world with
attendance in excess of 1,000 people and several dozen active working
RFC Editor, et al. Informational [Page 3]
RFC 2555 30 Years of RFCs 7 April 1999
groups, the early Network Working Groups were small and tame, but
they seemed large and only barely manageable at the time. One
tradition that doesn't seem to have changed at all is the spirit of
unrestrained participation in working group meetings.
Our initial group met a handful of times in the summer and fall of
1968 and winter 1969. Our earliest meetings were unhampered by
knowledge of what the network would look like or how it would
interact with the hosts. Depending on your point of view, this
either allowed us or forced us to think about broader and grander
topics. We recognized we would eventually have to get around to
dealing with message formats and other specific details of low-level
protocols, but our first thoughts focused on what applications the
network might support. In our view, the 50 kilobit per second
communication lines being used for the ARPANET seemed slow, and we
worried that it might be hard to provide high-quality interactive
service across the network. I wish we had not been so accurate!
When BBN issued its Host-IMP specification in spring 1969, our
freedom to wander over broad and grand topics ended. Before then,
however, we tried to consider the most general designs and the most
exciting applications. One thought that captured our imagination was
the idea of downloading a small interpretative program at the
beginning of a session. The downloaded program could then control
the interactions and make efficient use of the narrow bandwidth
between the user's local machine and the back-end system the user was
interacting with. Jeff Rulifson at SRI was the prime mover of this
line of thinking, and he took a crack at designing a Decode-Encode
Language (DEL) [RFC 5]. Michel Elie, visiting at UCLA from France,
worked on this idea further and published Proposal for a Network
Interchange Language (NIL) [RFC 51]. The emergence of Java and
ActiveX in the last few years finally brings those early ideas to
fruition, and we're not done yet. I think we will continue to see
striking advances in combining communication and computing.
I have already suggested that the early RFCs and the associated
Network Working Group laid the foundation for the Internet
Engineering Task Force. Two all-important aspects of the early work
deserve mention, although they're completely evident to anyone who
participates in the process today. First, the technical direction we
chose from the beginning was an open architecture based on multiple
layers of protocol. We were frankly too scared to imagine that we
could define an all-inclusive set of protocols that would serve
indefinitely. We envisioned a continual process of evolution and
addition, and obviously this is what's happened.
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The RFCs themselves also represented a certain sense of fear. After
several months of meetings, we felt obliged to write down our
thoughts. We parceled out the work and wrote the initial batch of
memos. In addition to participating in the technical design, I took
on the administrative function of setting up a simple scheme for
numbering and distributing the notes. Mindful that our group was
informal, junior and unchartered, I wanted to emphasize these notes
were the beginning of a dialog and not an assertion of control.
It's now been thirty years since the first RFCs were issued. At the
time, I believed the notes were temporary and the entire series would
die off in a year or so once the network was running. Thanks to the
spectacular efforts of the entire community and the perseverance and
dedication of Jon Postel, Joyce Reynolds and their crew, the humble
series of Requests for Comments evolved and thrived. It became the
mainstay for sharing technical designs in the Internet community and
the archetype for other communities as well. Like the Sorcerer's
Apprentice, we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams and our worst
fears.
4. RFCs - The Great Conversation - Vint Cerf
A long time ago, in a network far, far away...
Considering the movement of planet Earth around the Sun and the Sun
around the Milky Way galaxy, that first network IS far away in the
relativistic sense. It takes 200 million years for the Sun to make
its way around the galaxy, so thirty years is only an eyeblink on the
galactic clock. But what a marvelous thirty years it has been! The
RFCs document the odyssey of the ARPANET and, later, the Internet, as
its creators and netizens explore, discover, build, re-build, argue
and resolve questions of design, concepts and applications of
computer networking.
It has been ultimately fascinating to watch the transformation of the
RFCs themselves from their earliest, tentative dialog form to today's
much more structured character. The growth of applications such as
email, bulletin boards and the world wide web have had much to do
with that transformation, but so has the scale and impact of the
Internet on our social and economic fabric. As the Internet has taken
on greater economic importance, the standards documented in the RFCs
have become more important and the RFCs more formal. The dialog has
moved to other venues as technology has changed and the working
styles have adapted.
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Hiding in the history of the RFCs is the history of human
institutions for achieving cooperative work. And also hiding in that
history are some heroes that haven't been acknowledged. On this
thirtieth anniversary, I am grateful for the opportunity to
acknowledge some of them. It would be possible to fill a book with
such names - mostly of the authors of the RFCs, but as this must be a
brief contribution, I want to mention four of them in particular:
Steve Crocker, Jon Postel, Joyce K. Reynolds and Bob Braden.
Steve Crocker is a modest man and would likely never make the
observation that while the contents of RFC 1 might have been entirely
forgettable, the act of writing RFC 1 was indicative of the brave and
ultimately clear-visioned leadership that he brought to a journey
into the unknown. There were no guides in those days - computer
networking was new and few historical milestones prepared us for what
lay ahead. Steve's ability to accommodate a diversity of views, to
synthesize them into coherence and, like Tom Sawyer, to persuade
others that they wanted to devote their time to working on the
problems that lay in the path of progress can be found in the early
RFCs and in the Network Working Group meetings that Steve led.
In the later work on Internet, I did my best to emulate the framework
that Steve invented: the International Network Working Group (INWG)
and its INWG Notes, the Internet Working Group and its Internet
Experiment Notes (IENs) were brazen knock-offs of Steve's
organizational vision and style.
It is doubtful that the RFCs would be the quality body of material
they are today were it not for Jonathan Postel's devotion to them
from the start. Somehow, Jon knew, even thirty years ago that it
might be important to document what was done and why, to say nothing
of trying to capture the debate for the benefit of future networkers
wondering how we'd reached some of the conclusions we did (and
probably shake their heads...).
Jon was the network's Boswell, but it was his devotion to quality and
his remarkable mix of technical and editing skills that permeate many
of the more monumental RFCs that dealt with what we now consider the
TCP/IP standards. Many bad design decisions were re-worked thanks to
Jon's stubborn determination that we all get it "right" - as the
editor, he simply would not let something go out that didn't meet his
personal quality filter. There were times when we moaned and
complained, hollered and harangued, but in the end, most of the time,
Jon was right and we knew it.
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Joyce K. Reynolds was at Jon's side for much of the time that Jon was
the RFC editor and as has been observed, they functioned in unison
like a matched pair of superconducting electrons - and
superconductors they were of the RFC series. For all practical
purposes, it was impossible to tell which of the two had edited any
particular RFC. Joyce's passion for quality has matched Jon's and
continues to this day. And she has the same subtle, puckish sense of
humor that emerged at unexpected moments in Jon's stewardship. One
example that affected me personally was Joyce's assignment of number
2468 to the RFC written to remember Jon. I never would have thought
of that, and it was done so subtly that it didn't even ring a bell
until someone sent me an email asking whether this was a coincidence.
In analog to classical mystery stories, the editor did it.
Another unsung hero in the RFC saga is Bob Braden - another man whose
modesty belies contributions of long-standing and monumental
proportions. It is my speculation that much of the quality of the
RFCs can be traced to consultations among the USC/ISI team, including
Jon, Joyce and Bob among others. Of course, RFC 1122 and 1123 stand
as two enormous contributions to the clarity of the Internet
standards. For that task alone, Bob deserves tremendous appreciation,
but he has led the End-to-End Research Group for many years out of
which has come some of the most important RFCs that refine our
understanding of optimal implementation of the protocols, especially
TCP.
When the RFCs were first produced, they had an almost 19th century
character to them - letters exchanged in public debating the merits
of various design choices for protocols in the ARPANET. As email and
bulletin boards emerged from the fertile fabric of the network, the
far-flung participants in this historic dialog began to make
increasing use of the online medium to carry out the discussion -
reducing the need for documenting the debate in the RFCs and, in some
respects, leaving historians somewhat impoverished in the process.
RFCs slowly became conclusions rather than debates.
Jon permitted publication of items other than purely technical
documents in this series. Hence one finds poetry, humor (especially
the April 1 RFCs which are as funny today as they were when they were
published), and reprints of valuable reference material mixed into
the documents prepared by the network working groups.
In the early 1970s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency was
conducting several parallel research programs into packet switching
technology, after the stunning success of this idea in the ARPANET.
Among these were the Packet Radio Network, the Atlantic Packet
Satellite Network and the Internet projects. These each spawned note
series akin to but parallel to the RFCs. PRNET Notes, ARPA Satellite
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System Notes (bearing the obvious and unfortunate acronym...),
Internet Experiment Notes (IENs), and so on. After the Internet
protocols were mandated to be used on the ARPANET and other DARPA-
sponsored networks in January 1983 (SATNET actually converted before
that), Internet- related notes were merged into the RFC series. For a
time, after the Internet project seemed destined to bear fruit, IENs
were published in parallel with RFCs. A few voices, Danny Cohen's in
particular (who was then at USC/ISI with Jon Postel) suggested that
separate series were a mistake and that it would be a lot easier to
maintain and to search a single series. Hindsight seems to have
proven Danny right as the RFC series, with its dedicated editors,
seems to have borne the test of time far better than its more
ephemeral counterparts.
As the organizations associated with Internet continued to evolve,
one sees the RFCs adapting to changed circumstances. Perhaps the most
powerful influence can be seen from the evolution of the Internet
Engineering Task Force from just one of several task forces whose
chairpersons formed the Internet Activities Board to the dominant,
global Internet Standards development organization, managed by its
Internet Engineering Steering Group and operating under the auspices
of the Internet Society. The process of producing "standards-track"
RFCs is now far more rigorous than it once was, carries far more
impact on a burgeoning industry, and has spawned its own, relatively
informal "Internet Drafts" series of short-lived documents forming
the working set of the IETF working groups.
The dialogue that once characterized the early RFCs has given way to
thrice-annual face-to-face meetings of the IETF and enormous
quantities of email, as well as a growing amount of group-interactive
work through chat rooms, shared white boards and even more elaborate
multicast conferences. The parallelism and the increasing quantity of
transient dialogue surrounding the evolution of the Internet has made
the task of technology historians considerably more difficult,
although one can sense a counter-balancing through the phenomenal
amount of information accumulating in the World Wide Web. Even casual
searches often turn up some surprising and sometimes embarrassing old
memoranda - a number of which were once paper but which have been
rendered into bits by some enterprising volunteer.
The RFCs, begun so tentatively thirty years ago, and persistently
edited and maintained by Jon Postel and his colleagues at USC/ISI,
tell a remarkable story of exploration, achievement, and dedication
by a growing mass of internauts who will not sleep until the Internet
truly is for everyone. It is in that spirit that this remembrance is
offered, and in particular, in memory of our much loved colleague,
Jon Postel, without whose personal commitment to this archive, the
story might have been vastly different and not nearly as remarkable.
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5. Reflecting on 30 years of RFCs - Jake Feinler
By now we know that the first RFC was published on April 7, 1969 by
Steve Crocker. It was entitled "Host Software". The second RFC was
published on April 9, 1969 by Bill Duvall of SRI International (then
called Stanford Research Institute or SRI), and it too was entitled
"Host Software". RFC 2 was a response to suggestions made in RFC 1-
-and so the dialog began.
Steve proposed 2 experiments in RFC 1:
"1) SRI is currently modifying their on-line retrieval system which
will be the major software component of the Network Documentation
Center [or The SRI NIC as it soon came to be known] so that it can be
modified with Model 35 teletypes. The control of the teletypes will
be written in DEL [Decode-Encode Language]. All sites will write DEL
compilers and use NLS [SRI Doug Engelbart's oNLine System] through
the DEL program".
"2) SRI will write a DEL front end for full NLS, graphics included.
UCLA and UTAH will use NLS with graphics".
RFC 2, issued 2 days later, proposed detailed procedures for
connecting to the NLS documentation system across the network. Steve
may think RFC 1 was an "entirely forgettable" document; however, as
an information person, I beg to differ with him. The concepts
presented in this first dialog were mind boggling, and eventually led
to the kind of network interchange we are all using on the web today.
(Fortunately, we have graduated beyond DEL and Model 35 teletypes!)
RFC 1 was, I believe, a paper document. RFC 2 was produced online
via the SRI NLS system and was entered into the online SRI NLS
Journal. However, it was probably mailed to each recipient via snail
mail by the NIC, as email and the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) had
not yet been invented.
RFC 3, again by Steve Crocker, was entitled, "Documentation
Conventions;" and we see that already the need for a few ground rules
was surfacing. More ground-breaking concepts were introduced in this
RFC. It stated that:
"The Network Working Group (NWG) is concerned with the HOST software,
the strategies for using the network, and the initial experiments
with the network. Documentation of the NWG's effort is through notes
such as this. Notes may be produced at any site by anybody and
included in this series".
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It goes on to say:
"The content of a NWG note may be any thought, suggestion,
etc.related to the Host software or other aspect of the network.
Notes are encouraged to be timely rather than polished.
Philosophical positions without examples or other specifics, specific
suggestions or implementation techniques without introductory or
background explanation, and explicit questions without any attempted
answers are all acceptable. The minimum length for a NWG note is one
sentence".
"These standards (or lack of them) are stated explicitly for two
reasons. First, there is a tendency to view a written statement as
discussion of considerably less than authoritative ideas. Second,
there is a natural hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we
hope to ease this inhibition".
Steve asked that this RFC be sent to a distribution list consisting
of:
Bob Kahn, BBN
Larry Roberts, ARPA
Steve Carr, UCLA
Jeff Rulifson, UTAH
Ron Stoughton, UCSB
Steve Crocker, UCLA
Thus by the time the third RFC was published, many of the concepts of
how to do business in this new networking environment had been
established--there would be a working group of implementers (NWG)
actually discussing and trying things out; ideas were to be free-
wheeling; communications would be informal; documents would be
deposited (online when possible) at the NIC and distributed freely to
members of the working group; and anyone with something to contribute
could come to the party. With this one document a swath was
instantly cut through miles of red tape and pedantic process. Was
this radical for the times or what! And we were only up to RFC 3!
Many more RFCs followed and the SRI NLS Journal became the
bibliographic search service of the ARPANET. It differed from other
search services of the time in one important respect: when you got a
"hit" searching the journal online, not only did you get a citation
telling you such things as the author and title; you got an
associated little string of text called a "link". If you used a
command called "jump to link", voila! you got the full text of the
document. You did not have to go to the library, or send an order
off to an issuing agency to get a copy of the document, as was the
custom with other search services of the time. The whole document
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itself was right there immediately!
Also, any document submitted to the journal could not be changed.
New versions could be submitted, and these superceded old versions,
but again the new versions could not be changed. Each document was
given a unique identifying number, so it was easy to track. These
features were useful in a fast-moving environment. Documents often
went through several drafts before they were finally issued as an RFC
or other official document, and being able to track versions was very
useful.
The SRI NLS Journal was revolutionary for the time; however, access
to it online presented several operational problems. Host computers
were small and crowded, and the network was growing by leaps and
bounds; so connections had to be timed out and broken to give
everyone a chance at access. Also, the rest of the world was still a
paper world (and there were no scanners or laser printers, folks!),
so the NIC still did a brisk business sending out paper documents to
requestors.
By 1972 when I became Principal Investigator for the NIC project, the
ARPANET was growing rapidly, and more and more hosts were being
attached to it. Each host was required to have a technical contact
known as the Technical Liaison, and most of the Liaison were also
members of the NWG. Each Liaison was sent a set of documents by the
NIC called "functional documents" which included the Protocol
Handbook (first issued by BBN and later published by the NIC.) The
content of the Protocol Handbook was made up of key RFCs and a
document called "BBN 1822" which specified the Host-to-Imp protocol.
The NWG informed the NIC as to which documents should be included in
the handbook; and the NIC assembled, published, and distributed the
book. Alex McKenzie of BBN helped the NIC with the first version of
the handbook, but soon a young fellow, newly out of grad school,
named Jon Postel joined the NWG and became the NIC's contact and
ARPA's spokesperson for what should be issued in the Protocol
Handbook.
No one who is familiar with the RFCs can think of them without
thinking of Dr. Jonathan Postel. He was "Mister RFC" to most of us.
Jon worked at SRI in the seventies and had the office next to mine.
We were both members of Doug Engelbart's Augmentation Research
Center. Not only was Jon a brilliant computer scientist, he also
cared deeply about the process of disseminating information and
establishing a methodology for working in a networking environment.
We often had conversations way into the wee hours talking about ways
to do this "right". The network owes Jon a debt of gratitude for his
dedication to the perpetuation of the RFCs. His work, along with
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that of his staff, the NWG, the IETF, the various NICs, and CNRI to
keep this set of documents viable over the years was, and continues
to be, a labor of love.
Jon left SRI in 1976 to join USC-ISI, but by that time the die was
cast, and the RFCs, NWG, Liaison, and the NIC were part of the
network's way of doing business. However, the SRI NLS Journal system
was becoming too big for its host computer and could not handle the
number of users trying to access it. Email and FTP had been
implemented by now, so the NIC developed methodology for delivering
information to users via distributed information servers across the
network. A user could request an RFC by email from his host computer
and have it automatically delivered to his mailbox. Users could also
purchase hardcopy subscriptions to the RFCs and copies of the
Protocol Handbook, if they did not have network access.
The NIC worked with Jon, ARPA, DCA, NSF, other NICs, and other
agencies to have secondary reference sets of RFCs easily accessible
to implementers throughout the world. The RFCs were also shared
freely with official standards bodies, manufacturers and vendors,
other working groups, and universities. None of the RFCs were ever
restricted or classified. This was no mean feat when you consider
that they were being funded by DoD during the height of the Cold War.
Many of us worked very hard in the early days to establish the RFCs
as the official set of technical notes for the development of the
Internet. This was not an easy job. There were suggestions for many
parallel efforts and splinter groups. There were naysayers all along
the way because this was a new way of doing things, and the ARPANET
was "coloring outside the lines" so to speak. Jon, as Editor-in-
Chief was criticized because the RFCs were not issued by an
"official" standards body, and the NIC was criticized because it was
not an "official" document issuing agency. We both strived to marry
the new way of doing business with the old, and fortunately were
usually supported by our government sponsors, who themselves were
breaking new ground.
Many RFCs were the end result of months of heated discussion and
implementation. Authoring one of them was not for the faint of
heart. Feelings often ran high as to what was the "right" way to go.
Heated arguments sometimes ensued. Usually they were confined to
substance, but sometimes they got personal. Jon would often step in
and arbitrate. Eventually the NWG or the Sponsors had to say, "It's
a wrap. Issue a final RFC". Jon, as Editor-in-Chief of the RFCs,
often took merciless flak from those who wanted to continue
discussing and implementing, or those whose ideas were left on the
cutting room floor. Somehow he always managed to get past these
controversies with style and grace and move on. We owe him and
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others, who served on the NWG or authored RFCs, an extreme debt of
gratitude for their contributions and dedication.
At no time was the controversy worse than it was when DoD adopted
TCP/IP as its official host-to-host protocols for communications
networks. In March 1982, a military directive was issued by the
Under Secretary of Defense, Richard DeLauer. It simply stated that
the use of TCP and IP was mandatory for DoD communications networks.
Bear in mind that a military directive is not something you discuss -
the time for discussion is long over when one is issued. Rather a
military directive is something you DO. The ARPANET and its
successor, the Defense Data Network, were military networks, so the
gauntlet was down and the race was on to prove whether the new
technology could do the job on a real operational network. You have
no idea what chaos and controversy that little 2-page directive
caused on the network. (But that's a story for another time.)
However, that directive, along with RFCs 791 and 793 (IP and TCP)
gave the RFCs as a group of technical documents stature and
recognition throughout the world. (And yes, TCP/IP certainly did do
the job!)
Jon and I were both government contractors, so of course followed the
directions of our contracting officers. He was mainly under contract
to ARPA, whereas the NIC was mainly under contract to DCA. BBN was
another key contractor. For the most part we all worked as a team.
However, there was frequent turnover in military personnel assigned
to both the ARPANET and the DDN, and we all collaborated to try to
get all the new participants informed as to what was available to
them when they joined the network. We also tried to foster
collaboration rather than duplication of effort, when it was
appropriate. The NWG (or IETF as it is now known) and the RFCs
became the main vehicles for interagency collaboration as the DoD
protocols began to be used on other government, academic, and
commercial networks.
I left SR